Lansley details social care funding plans

The NHS will be forced to give councils the majority of the £1bn additional annual funding it was directed to spend on social care in the spending review, health secretary Andrew Lansley has revealed.

Speaking at the National Children and Adult Services Conference in Manchester, Mr Lansley spelled out more details of the way the health service’s share of £2bn in extra social care funding is to be spent. Mr Lansley also gave more details on pilots for health and wellbeing boards and confirmed the expansion of social work pilots into adult social services.

Referring to the Department of Health’s additional funding for social care for the NHS, which starts at £800m next year and rises to £1.1bn in 2013-14 before dropping back to £1bn in 2014-15, Mr Lansley said that from April the NHS would be expected to spend £150m on reablement services for people leaving hospital, backed by new rules that will make hosptal trusts responsible for patients for 30 days after their discharge.

Mr Lansley said that the remaining £650m of the NHS’s social care allocation for 2011-12 would be distributed to PCTs for “transfer to local authorities” for spending on health and social care.

He subsequently told HSJ’s sister magazine Local Government Chronicle that he expected PCTs to use it to commission councils to provide prevention services, such as telehealth, equipment services, and care support.

However, having earlier referred to the spending review’s “unhelpful reductions to grants” for social care, he said it was accepted that some of the sevices NHS trusts commissioned may be those that councils feared they would otherwise have to cut.

“There will be an emphasis on prevention, but we understand that some of this will be to meet the cost of funding care services,” he said.

He told the conference that individual allocations of the funding would be set out in December, along with indicative allocations for 2012-13.

Sherwood Forest Hospital Foundation Trust worked towards identifying patients with a learning disability to provide them tailored care and won the Enhancing Care by Sharing Data and Information category at the 2018 HSJ Awards